Insight Venture Partners invests $165 million in automated testing startup Tricentis

Tricentis, a startup that helps enterprise development teams automate software testing, got a bushel of money today from Insight Venture Partners — $165 million to be exact. As part of the deal, Insight Managing Director Mike Triplett will join the Tricentis board.

In a traditional software development cycle, developers took months to create and deliver a product. Testing involved writing scripts to test all the different parts of the program from the front-end interface to the back-end connectors. When the software changed, it usually broke the scripts, and triggered a lot of time-consuming manual fixing.

That worked fine when the world moved slowly, but in today’s agile development environment when programs are being updated much more quickly, developers required a much faster solution. That’s where Tricentis comes in.

“What we do is scan the application, both the GUI and API, and interpret the code natively. We interpret and understand [the application] functionally at a business layer, and [create testing] building blocks. Then we run tests against .NET, HTML or Java or whatever the API may be,” Tricentis CEO Sandeep Johri explained. If the program is updated, you simply rescan.

It’s certainly an approach that appealed to Insight, who saw a company that was solving a big issue for enterprises as they moved from an older Waterfall development methodology to a more modern Agile one.

While there are open source tools that provide a similar level of automation, and many companies are using those tools along side Tricentis, Johri says in the complex environments where his company tends to sell, they can’t match his company’s speed of automation.

Johri didn’t have any desire to talk valuation, and didn’t appear to be worried about any of that. He says he is happy to have a single investor in Insight, and sees over-valued companies like ‘unicorns’ (companies with valuations over a $1 billion) having issues realizing value for employees and investors.

The company began life in Austria in 2007, selling its solution mostly in German-speaking countries Germany, Switzerland and Austria. It bootstrapped for the first 6 years, when it decided to expand beyond its regional markets, and took $7 million in Series A in 2013.

Today it has more than 400 customers and 260 employees worldwide. Its development team continues to be based in Austria. With $165 million in hand, the company plans to build out its sales and marketing team to keep expanding its market. Johri says his company hasn’t burned a lot of cash to this point, and he wants to keep it that way, but will keep his eyes open for strategic acquisitions.